Alasse Irena

A lot of stuff going on in my life. Like way way way too much stuff. Impulsively on little sleep and the first day of my period, I decided that it was time to call work to account about a bunch of questionable rostering practices they've been doing with their casual staff so now I have my last three shifts before Christmas to meet with management about that.

I still haven't done any Christmas shopping. Like none. The day off I was planning to do it on I had a specialist appointment I'd been waiting for come through so that's the afternoon gone. I'll get there, but it's getting tight.

I scraped in with my Yuletide fic, which I'm pretty happy about, even if I did wrap it up in a public library between a lunch date and an afternoon picnic.

The 24th can't come soon enough, when hopefully I'll be allowed to breathe.

Anyway, here's a thing, if you want to kick-start your "I'll blog more in the new year" resolution. A bunch of fun journal prompts and then a friending meme, spread over January.

Picture under the cut of me finally being able to do a split (at least on the right leg). Now I guess to work on the other leg.

( A goal long (albeit haphazardly) worked for )

 It is very hot here! In spite of this, my mother's family's Christmas picnic last week managed to get cancelled for rain . My new balcony faces slightly north of east, which is perfect for sunny breakfasts and still shelters my plants from afternoon summer sun.

I still had two Christmas dinners in one day. My girlfriend has a small cousin who is fourteen and queer and just on the cusp of an anime phase, who is lovely. Also we came home with the carcasses of both goose and turkey (her family really goes all out), so we have made a fuck tonne of stock.

I am looking forward to fandomweekly , to encourage me to do writing and fandom participation more, though I'm trying very hard not to make New Year's Resolutions. I didn't do Yuletide this year. Moving house got the better of me. But I'm looking forward to going through the collection.

 Well, the cleaners were meant to arrive at 1, and it wasn't until I texted at like 1:45 that someone bothered to tell me that one of the cleaners was sick and "we didn't think this would impact the schedule. Should be there around 2:30." Like, okay, that happens, fine,  but you clearly knew by 1 that yippy weren't there, and didn't bother to tell me??

So now all the things I intended to do this afternoon are squashed into a smaller time, and I couldn't do a supermarket run or anything because until someone replied to me at 2, I had to assume they could be here at any time, and I've got my period and I am way more upset about all of this than I should be.

Anyway I have just remembered there is ice cream in the freezer, so I will go and eat that.  Thanks for putting up with this whine, everyone.  Fandom content to come as soon as I have WiFi at home. 

1. I did very well on my honours thesis! All my marks are good and it's...just kind of a pity I don't really want to go into academia, because I apparently have the skills. I mean, I could've managed my time better, but as for the actual work, I don't think it came too hard. So I am pleased with myself, but kind of confused. What now, self? What noooooow?
2. I did not do so well on my nanowrimo. I got a good 15K, but I'm pretty sure I only wrote on about ten days out of the thirty, which was not really what I was aiming for. Anyway, the thing I was working on...I think needed more thought, or something. It had a bit of that trying-to-build-a-functional-table-out-of-random-items-you-find-in-your-bedroom, but it was a good premise, I think, and well worth continuing to think about. So I guess we can call that a small success.
3. In any case, I am now free for more writing projects, which is to say, Yuletide! I have some vague plans but haven't yet started writing, and I'd love to be able to get a few treats out as well. But we will see. When those have ever happened for me, they've happened in an unexpected flurry of activity in late December.
4. We are apparently set up for some fairly dramatic storms this weekend. They are saying we will get the month's average rainfall in a day...or something - it is hard to keep track of what the weather bureau is predicting and who is just getting hyperbolic on my facebook. But anyway, that's exciting. My roof no longer seems to leak, but my girlfriend's does, so hopefully her ceiling does not collapse on her.

I am sure there were more things in this post when I started writing it, but I've forgotten them all by now. Anyway, none of them are any of the posts that I have been planning to write recently, but anyway, to add to that list of unwritten posts:

1. A fairly melodramatic personal crisis regarding ballet.
2. An Incredibly Trashy Novel review.

 Anyway, our friend Mr. Turnbull says he intends to get this done by Christmas.

So we'll see.

So after many months of "But think of the children!" and "What about our religious freedoms??" and "Does this mean school boys will have to wear dresses?" and other similar bullshit, the fucking postal survey has told us what we all already knew, which is that a signifcant majority of Australians are in favour of equal marriage.

And also, if we're going to have an "unprecedented exercise in democracy", as Turnbull proudly called it, like if the goal of this was really "giving all Australians a say", then when's he going to start doing mass public opinion polls about our deeply awful treatment of refugees? Or about education funding? Like either you think this kind of direct democracy is important to good government, in which case, where are the rest of my Non-Binding Postal Surveys, or this is a once off, in which case it was a fucking stupid time wasting measure to appease the conservatives in your party.

I don't understand why this was worth the effort. We knew Australians were generally in favour. This is happening one way or another. I don't see why a delay of like four more months was worth it to anyone?

Today I got ginger pu'er tea on sale from T2's unloved teas crate, which has turned out to be quite nice. Pu'er is very sort of...earthy, and that seems to go well with ginger.

My father sent me a link a little while ago to a radio program he caught (he's living in the past; periodically he still says "wireless", mostly he calls his radio his "transistor" - though to his credit he managed to find the thing online and link me to it) about exploitation and unethical working conditions and tea plantations which I think pertains to the company that T2 sources their tea from, and I still haven't got round to listening to it. Anyway, I may have to do some research and see what's going with regard to being an ethical tea drinker. I drink a lot of tea, so I feel I should know.

So it turns out even though I thought I'd submitted my thesis draft, it didn't go through. I had an email from the co-ordinator this morning that was like "You haven't submitted a draft? Is there one coming? Are you okay?" So I have resubmitted and hopefully that's fine. This is really at least partly my fault for not looking out for the "successfully submitted" email that you get, but I was running out the door when I did it so... Oh well, it's in now, and it doesn't actually contribute to my overall mark, so everything is fine.

Now I have queer podcast editing to do, so I guess I will take a moment to spruik my friends' and my project. We're running a queer history podcast! We publish an episode on the 1st and 15th every month, and talk about queer people in history. I might be biased, but I think we're pretty interesting. But anyway, come find us! We're on itunes or podbean if that suits you better.

Anyway, it is very cold and I must get to work, so I am off to make tea.

So yesterday I got up at 5am to watch the Eurovision final, having not gone to sleep until about 1:30 or 2. We intended to go to bed about midnight and get some decent chunk of sleep before the had to get up, but I ended up in an interesting conversation with my sister about the Hogwarts founders. Anyway, with the help of hot beverages and blankets, we watched the thing, and I was eligible to vote in Eurovision for the first time ever! I voted for Israel, Lithuania and Serbia, I think, but Sweden was pretty clever, what with the animations, and we were pretty happy with the win.

As for Australia, we were quite pleased with our entry, and fifth seems like a respectable result for our first Eurovision entry (Sweden and Austria are our favourite countries ever now for giving us 12 points).

An honourable mention goes to Austria, because just as I was saying 'This one's a bit predictable", the piano burst into flames. We chose to imagine that it was a pyrotechnics malfunction, and the piano wasn't meant to be burning, but the pianist was very dedicated to his performance and played on, because it was more dramatic that way.

My brother's birthday is today. We went out to dinner last night (so much delicious Thai food), and midway through, my sister became aware that the elephant shaped candle-holders and scrunched-up napkins could be used to recreate Hannibal crossing the alps. So then she had to use all the dishes to re-enact the battle of Cannae for my mother, and basically hanging out with classics students is an A+ idea.

Here are the important questions we have about Hogwarts, if anyone can answer them:

1) We're told somewhere that Merlin was a Slytherin. Merlin is way before Hogwarts was founded. Is this the wizard equivalent of the thing where totalitarian governments claim their nation totally invented aeroplanes?
2) Castles in north-west Europe so far as we can tell were typically timber rather than stone in the 10th century. Did no-one notice and think to fill in the Chamber of Secrets when they were upgrading to stone?
3) The plumbing is clearly a later addition. Who the hell made sure Moaning Myrtle's bathroom was connected to the Chamber of Secrets when it was built?

There were many more questions, but this is a select few.